About Me

Tuesday, 11 February 2014

Different Similarities

After booting a first job
is to check the Obituaries to confirm my continuing presence and to retrieve
the memory of any bits of my past that connect.

Today in the Telegraph
list were two that seemed to be in sharp contrast. One was of the former child film star Shirley
Temple, 85, and the other Stuart Hall, 82, the Jamaican born English cultural
theorist cum political philosopher.

Both have Wikipedia pages
and other listings telling their stories as well as the summaries in the
obituaries. Shirley went on to a
distinguished career in politics in later life, Stuart has been credited with the
thinking that created major planks in the Labour Party policy making of the
last three decades.

Neither are any personal
connection but both had an influence one way or another. My parents were regular cinema goers and as
for some reason neighbours were reluctant to sit or take me in I was dragged
along.

There were certain films
where one was restive. Any romantic
film, ugh Charles Boyer, or child stars, oh no no not Shirley Temple or Judy
Garland might well lead to the cinema manager having a quiet word.

The result was that while
very many of my parent's generation and those following bought into the notion
of The American Dream, Hollywood and media style, I did not. But thanks to the men of the US 82nd Airborne
Division and contact with ordinary Americans, I did have a healthy respect for
them and their capabilities.

Quite why I did not bump
into Stuart Hall at some stage is one of the accidents of life, simply that we
were not in the same place at the same time.
Basically, his ideas about culture and society were derived from,
related to and part of the warp and weft of the metropolitan Left and people of
the post war mid 20th Century, they are listed in the biographies.

A couple of years in a
London Secondary Modern school in the 60's would tell you some things but it
was far from typical of the British working classes around the country and nor
did he see much of manual work, factory work or the basic public services that
existed then. Bluntly, he like his academic associates was always well removed
from the daily grind.

So today we find ourselves
in a culture and way of living in the UK that is defined by a global media
celebrity and entertainment industry that saturates our communications and
politics.

This is largely based on
that of the USA which has grown and expanded since the early 20th Century. Shirley Temple was part of that and for a
brief space of time promoted an ideal of childhood.

Stuart's ideals made for a
woolly notion of theoretical culture and meaning. This was supposed to derive from the working
class but that class now and in the coming generations are far removed from
those of the past in almost every way.

His idea's were oblivious
to either technological change or the pace of radical reshaping of work
patterns, movement and the basic thinking patterns of so many people compared
to what some of the Left thought they should be.

So now we have a Labour
Party based on cultural theories that bears no relation to realities. It is little wonder they were bought so
easily by the extractive financial and media industries that had emerged in the
late 20th Century.

Two people so different
yet so much alike in being party to the selling of illusions of life that were fictions of the mind.